Hark, she thought she heard a bird sing in a far off, dreamy way, and for a moment she made mud pies in the back yard of the hut on the mountain, under the black-oak in the yard, with the glint of soft sunshine over everything and the murmur of green leaves in the trees above, as the wind from off the mountain went through them, and the anemone, and bellworts, and daisies grew beneath and around. Was it a bluebird? She had never seen but one and it had built its nest in a hole in a hollow tree, the summer before she went into the mill to work. She listened again--yes, it did sound something like a bluebird, peeping in a distant far off way, such as she had heard in the cabin on the mountain before she had ever heard the voice of the Big Thing at the mill. She listened, and a wave of disappointment swept over her baby face; for, listening closely, she found it was an unoiled separator, that peeped in a bluebird way now and then, above the staccato of some rusty spindle. But in the song of that bluebird and the glory of an imaginary mud pie, all the disappointment of what she had missed swept over her. Ten o'clock--the little fingers throbbed and burned, the tiny legs were stiff and tired, the little head seemed as a block of wood, but still the Steam Thing took no thought of rest. Eleven o'clock--oh, but to rest awhile! To rest under the trees in the yard, for the sunshine looked so warm and bright out under the mill-windows, and the memory of that bluebird's song, though but an imitation, still echoed in her ear. And those mud pies!--she saw them all around her and in such lovely bits of old broken crockery and--.... She felt a rude punch in the side. It was Jud Carpenter standing over her and pointing to where a frowzled broken thread was tangling itself around a separator. She had dreamed but a minute--half a dozen threads had broken. It was a rude punch and it hurt her side and frightened her. With a snarl and a glare he passed on while Shiloh flew to her bobbin. This fright made her work the next hour with less fatigue. But she could not forget the song of the bluebird, and once, when Appomattox looked at her, she was working her mouth in a song,--a Sunday School song she had picked up at the Bishop's church. Appomattox could not hear it--no one had a license to hear a song in the Beast Thing's Den--nothing was ever privileged to sing but it,--but she knew from the way her mouth was working that Shiloh was singing. Oh, the instinct of happiness in the human heart! To sing through noises and aches and tired feet and stunned, blocky heads. To sing with no hope before her and the theft of her very childhood--ay, her life--going on by the Beast Thing and his men. God intended us to be happy, else He had never put so strong an instinct there. Twelve o'clock. The Steam Beast gave a triumphant scream heard above the roar of shuttle and steel. It was a loud, defiant, victorious roar which drowned all others.